Building a Strong Leadership Team in a Small Church (Video)

If you want a healthy church with a strong team of staff and volunteers, there are no shortcuts. We have to love people, support their gifts and allow for plenty of mistakes. Then keep doing it long enough to trust and be trusted.

Gary and I have spent 21 years together in ministry at our church. The average stay of a youth pastor is 7 months or less. The average stay of a lead pastor isn’t much better. We both feel very blessed.

In this 34-minute video, Gary and I talk candidly about our differences, our common ground and how we’ve used that relationship to teach and train volunteers, leaders and other church workers.

More videos from the workshop will be posted over the next few Fridays.

Your Church Can Do This, Too

One of the principles of the workshop was that we wanted everything we did to be repeatable by almost any other church. So we didn’t spend a ton of money to hire a professional videographer. In fact, we spent no money on it – since that’s the usual video budget of most Small Churches.

Instead, we used someone’s iPad, strapped it to a music stand, plugged a mic into it and had a volunteer sit in the front row to oversee it. Thus, the sitting-in-the-front-row, looking-up-my-nose feeling.

The entire workshop was livestreamed that day for people who couldn’t get to Southern California to participate in person. These videos are the result of that experiment – an experiment that, thankfully, worked.

So the audio and video aren’t slick and professional. But you can see and hear what’s going on perfectly fine. Not bad for zero money. And yes, you can do this in your church, too.

I want to thank three of my church volunteers who put all this together for me. Christian Pedersen and Vic Brad oversaw the setup that day. Ben Wilson edited the videos into the pieces we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks.

So what do you think? How do you work with and build up staff and volunteers from your limited pool of people?

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